Will the Obama administration be serious about climate change?

Scenarios
of climate change and its societal impacts are everyday stuff in today’s
academic and think tank world. However, I recently came across a book that is
in many ways fascinating. The is book
edited by Kurt M. Campbell and entitled Climatic
Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate
Change (Brookings Institution Press 2008). The book has been produced and
compiled under the auspices of the Center for American Progress that, John
Podesta and his colleagues set up in 2003 and, which subsequently became a
haven for Democrats that had fled the Clinton Administration in 2000 after the
election of George W. Bush.

What is
then interesting in this collection of articles? The first aspect to catch the reader’s
attention is the acknowledgement section which lists a good number of members
in the American scientific and policy elites with Democratic persuasion. The book itself outlines three plausible climate
change scenarios developed by Jay Culledge who is a senior scientist from the Pew Center
on Climate Change. These three scenarios depict expected, severe and
catastrophic changes, and their consequences over the next thirty years, in the
case of the first two scenarios, and over the next one hundred years in the
case of the catastrophic scenario. After
the specification of scenarios, several authors explore their potential
political and social consequences.

The
collection of authors is impressive (which does not, of course, necessarily
assure quality). The authors include R. James Woolsey, a former director of
CIA, and Leon Fuerth, the former national security adviser to Vice President Al
Gore. The most interesting name among
the authors is John Podesta who is now co-heading Barack Obama’s presidential
transition team and who will, in all likelihood, be a central player in the new
administration. Some rumors put him in the position of the Energy Secretary.
Podesta is the former Chief of Staff of Bill Clinton and supported Hillary
Clinton in Democratic primaries, but he made a smooth transition to the Obama
camp, partly through the good services of Tom Daschle for whom he worked as an
aide in the Senate.

In Climatic Cataclysm, Podesta has
coauthored a chapter on the security implications of the “expected climate
change” (for an academic reader it is relevant to note that his name comes
before the co-author, Peter Ogden). The
chapter is a matter-of- fact kind of analysis that builds its political commentary
on the scientific conclusions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). The authors explore the
implications of climate change for development and stability in various regions
of the world and come to the conclusion that, despite the risk of hazards in
many parts of the world, South Asia appears to
be most exposed to adverse consequences of climate change. For good reasons, China’s
and, to a lesser extent, Russia’s
challenge to global warming and its curtailment receives a lengthy discussion.

In a policy
perspective, the most riveting issue is, though, Podesta’s and Ogden’s discussion on the impact of climate
change on energy policies. To cut the story short, the authors see that “oil
will remain the key commodity for the United States” and while natural
gas remains important, in the world the “rate of growth in coal consumption
will exceed that of natural gas”. The authors are skeptical of nuclear power,
as it has potential adverse consequences for national and societal security,
while biofuels may become a consequential factor in transportation.

In his
chapter, Podesta comes out as an unreconstructed conservative in energy
policy. He is delivering a message that
is at odds with Obama’s professed investment of some $ 140 billion in
alternative sources of energy. Podesta and Ogden pay practically no attention to the
alternative sources of energy, but their geopolitical view of the world considers
fossil fules as the backbone of the energy policy of industrialized
countries. As a result, either Obama has
to give up his message of finding alternative solutions to the emitters of
greenhouse gases or, if Podesta becomes the Energy Secretary, he has to change
his mind (which does not seem to be easy for him as a gloves-off politician). (Subsequent note, John Podesta has announced that he will not take a position in the Obama adminstration)

True,
Podesta and Ogden say that the United States is expected to be the “first
responder” to various challenges but if the present article gives any hints,
the United States
will not be heading a revolution in clean energy technologies and the global mission
to control climate change. There is an
active debate going on in Obama’s transition team on whether the management of
the financial crisis and various reform proposals made by the candidate during
the campaign should be implement at once by a “big bang” or whether they should
be sequenced so that health care, energy, and other problems will be addressed
at a later stage. If Podesta takes the lead, a significant turn in energy
policy may not be a priority issue.